Introduction

Abstract

This symposium brings together people from the fields of law, history, economics, theology, and philosophy to address whether there is a higher law, whether it matters, and the numerous other questions that flow from these questions. The ordering of the essays in this symposium is not based on some higher law. It could have been done in many different ways. We divided the essays into historic, modem, theological, and philosophical sections, though almost every speaker made historic, theological, and philosophical claims about the subject. Here is a brief overview of the symposium essays.

Stephen Smith provides a preface to the symposium. Most of the symposium authors read Smith's Law's Quandary, a ground-breaking work on the current status of higher law theory, and many authors address his arguments. In the symposium preface, he argues that, though twentieth century legal theory generally rejected the notion that there is a higher law, law practice generally has continued to presuppose its existence. If sixteenth century British lawyer and legal scholar Christopher St. Germain were to return, he would find the work of lawyers to be surprisingly familiar. Smith, in dialogue with St. Germain, explores several questions: Without a higher law, what is the authority of law? Without a higher law, how are we to evaluate whether a law is just? Without a higher law, how are we to determine the meaning of a text when the text is unclear? Ordinary lawyers and judges avoid these problems because in the practice of law, they assume the existence of a higher law. Modem law practice, like classic legal theory, assumes that "when we human beings make and interpret and apply law, we are in a sense joining in a sort of cooperative venture with an intrinsically normative cosmos."